With effect from January 2017, Chrome will show if a website is non-secure.

This is an ongoing initiative by Google to make web browsing more secure. Google stated the reason for the update is to make the web a ”safer place” for us to browse and that "user security has always been a top priority" and with that in mind they started to rank ‘HTTPs’ pages over HTTP by default.

So what does this mean to me?

Potentially this could have a direct impact on the users to your website. If Chrome tells them your website is non-secure, will they not worry and stay on the site or will they worry and leave and go elsewhere.

Another element to bear in mind is that recent statistics show that the Google Chrome browser is the most popular worldwide with somewhere between 50% & 60% choosing it as their primary browser so we know a lot of users will be seeing this.

What do I need to do? You need to make sure your Brochure website or Ecommerce website runs securely via HTTPs

The way to do this is to have your own SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) Certificate installed.

This SSL certificate provides an encrypted link between the web server and the browser. This link ensures that all data passed between the web server and browser remains private and secure and that's what Google and Chrome are both looking for.

Potential SEO benefit

An additional benefit of having this SSL Certificate installed is that as Google is now ranking HTTPs websites higher than non-secure HTTP websites, potentially your website ranking on Google could improve.

Contact Net Digital to discuss making your website run via HTTPs

We have already started this work for a number of our clients however if we haven’t done this for you already then contact us and we can action this for you.